Wednesday, 12 November 2008

Home - the long way!

We arrived at the airport in good time (of course, everyone knows I’m always early!) only to discover that we could have had 25kg each of luggage not 20 as we thought. Ian swears he didn’t know about this before, I’m still not convinced.Our flight left on time and we were proceeding a little bumpy but fine towards our destination of Wellington where we were to change planes and proceed to Melbourne.However half way to Wellington our friendly Captain advises that the winds on the ground are 100kph in Wellington so we’re being diverted to Palmerston North. OK I say to myself this is not looking like a normal trip home right now but I have faith in Air New Zealand. As we are about to land in Palmerston North we are told that we will be advised of how we are getting to our destination and we are--- we’re going back to Christchurch and then we’re staying there overnight and leaving for Melbourne at 6am so they would like to see us back at 4am. Yeah right ---- I’m really pretty at 4am, just ask Ian but of course that’s what we’ll do. So we wait for a couple of hours to fly back to Christchurch in this dinky little airport and have to pay a $5.00 departure tax for the privilege. I muttered that we hadn’t asked to come to Palmerston North but no one seemed to care anyway.After arriving back in Christchurch we found a motel after discovering Air New Zealand are really not that interested in where we stay because we are paying as they have no control over the weather. Ah well, the perils of not knowing how windy Wellington is I suppose.We assemble back at 5am having decided that 4am is too early and we would just get at the end of the line and fly uneventfully back to Melbourne having paid another departure tax. At least we are able to take advantage of the new in flight individual entertainment console which is even in cattle class and very handy. I thoroughly enjoyed Mumma Mia and bopped along with Meryl Streep to my heart’s content while Ian tried to pretend he didn’t know me.When we arrived in Melbourne we enjoyed a 90 minute wait as we proceeded at snails pace through Customs, duly declaring our walking shoes, two fortune cookies for Tom and Jess and our flaked rice. None of which were of any interest to the Customs people, they had a flight from Bali, one from India and a couple of other Asian ones to keep them content. Home at last!The last photo is one which probably best describes our final day and was one we saw so many times in New Zealand without any accompanying explanation that we couldn’t resist a photo figuring it would come in handy sometime.